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Dr. Nawalaal Mutawalli, the director of Iraq’s National Museum, stated in a press conference at the British Museum in London that at least one in ten Iraqi treasures were looted. He commented that around 13,000 objects have gone missing since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Since they have only searched through a part of the storage room, the situation could be worse. Forty-seven works from the museum’s exhibition room were taken, seven of which are “very important masterpieces.”

Among the missing treasures are pottery, figurines and terracottas and bricks with inscriptions of kings. The search at the museum just recently started because they did not have electricity.

Donny George, director of research at the museum, said that around 1,500 missing treasures have already been returned. Archaeology professor Elizabeth Stone, from Stony Brook University in New York said, “Looting of archaeological sites was very rare before the first Gulf War but it has escalated extraordinarily since the last war and there is not a lot of structure to protect them.

Some of these sites are almost completely gone. The impact in terms of archaeology is enormous.”